When Manfred had left for Italy, there had already been talk of new elections to right the political imbalance. He personally favored the leader of the National Socialist Party. Though he didn’t care for the excessive fury and bullying methods the man used to put his ideas across, he had to admit that the pride and patriotism that quivered in the words of that excellent orator moved and enflamed him. Deep down, he was a soldier: his love for his homeland, his desire to defend it from foreigners and expand its borders, formed part of his nature.
Moreover, he liked the fact that the man took his inspiration, more or less explicitly, from the Fascist regime. In Italy, he sensed a liveliness, an optimism, and a confidence in contrast with the difficult conditions in which most of the people seemed to be living. He wished he could see the same attitude spreading through Germany, among the elderly in particular, wearied by the war and the economic collapse. If the two countries, brothers deep down in their souls, were to share certain values, nothing and no one could ever stop them. That’s what he thought.
In the meantime, he told himself as he splashed cold water on his arms and back, he’d establish a nice strong alliance with the girl on the beach.
It was nice to feel that sensation again. It was nice to feel he was still alive. At the end of July he’d return home to vote in the federal elections, and to see if he could be useful in the reconstruction of German military might, which had until then been progressing slowly and discreetly. A couple of days ago he’d received a letter from a veteran, a onetime fellow soldier, asking if he was done with his life of leisure and was ready to venture once more into the breach. He’d written back, informing his old friend that nothing on earth could make him miss the opportunity to let him eat the dust of his charging steed.
The thought of his horse reminded him of the treatments he was taking on this island. Daily training and mineral water mud packs, that volcanic mud that so many doctors had described as miraculous, were having their beneficial effects. The pain in his shoulder was almost gone.
Manfred brushed his thick blond hair and looked up at the blue sky. He suspected that there was also another reason for his renewed sense of vigor.
Good officer that he was, he wondered exactly what strategy he should employ to outflank the barriers that Enrica had erected to protect herself. He was sure that if the girl could be persuaded that he would never do her any harm, she’d lower her defenses and soon let herself be lulled by her feelings.
As he was biting into one of the biscotti that the elderly proprietress of the pensione had given him, he caught himself fantasizing about the expressions on his parents’ faces if he returned home with a new wife, and an Italian one to boot. His mother had told him over and over again that Elsa was gone, that he needed to make a new life for himself, and that before she died, the one thing she wanted was to cradle in her arms a grandchild, to be certain that the family name would not die out with Manfred.
Enrica was young and self-assured, and she had beautiful hips. All the right features.
The major flashed a smile at the sea. After taking the mud, he would go back to the beach.
He had a painting to complete.
XXXVI
As soon as he was allowed, Ricciardi had run to Rosa’s bedside, taking the stairs two at a time.
He’d finally managed to send Maione home late into the night, convincing the brigadier that sleepy as he was, he was of no use to him: he could come back to work the next morning. Modo, as was so often the case, had stayed the night in the hospital’s internal quarters, and had gotten up twice to update Riccardi on his tata’s condition, which remained stable.
As for Ricciardi, he hadn’t slept a wink. He couldn’t manage to get used to the idea that he might be about to lose the woman who had always been his entire family.
He found her complexion pale, her breathing labored; she was sitting practically straight up, her body propped on four pillows. Standing in front of the bed, erect and motionless, was Nelide. Ricciardi greeted her fondly: it touched his heart to see her pure and silent love, and he was impressed by the fact that she showed no signs of weariness. And yet she must have stood there all night long.
He sat down, took Rosa’s hand in his, and his heart sank: the hand was icy cold. To look at her face, though, she appeared untroubled, and even faintly alert, as if she were listening to something. Ricciardi didn’t know what to make of it. He turned to Nelide.
“She didn’t ever wake up? Not even once?”
The girl shook her head. Then she spoke: “Cchiú scura d’a mezanotta nu’ ppò vveni’.”
It can’t get any darker than the middle of the night, the commissario translated mentally. He knew the young woman’s habit of speaking in proverbs; once or twice he and Rosa had even joked about it. Now, looking down at his old tata, he wondered if he would ever again hear that off-kilter, contagious laugh that had formed the background of so many moments of his life.
He missed Enrica—powerfully, sharply. He would have liked to let her know that Rosa—the woman who had become her friend, the woman who had talked endlessly to him about the shy, sweet girl who lived across the street from them—was ill, gravely ill. And that his heart was in tatters, and that a major part of his desolation was due to Enrica’s absence.
He rested his head against the bed and fell asleep.
After an amount of time he couldn’t have quantified, he felt a hand on shoulder. He woke up with a jerk and found Modo next to him.
“You didn’t go home, did you? Stubborn hardheaded man, I told you there was no point in staying.”
Ricciardi looked at Rosa; she hadn’t moved a millimeter.
“I can’t bring myself to leave her. And after all, today is Sunday, I don’t even have to work. I might as well stay here, don’t you think? If she happened to wake up . . .”
“Ricciardi, I’ll tell you again: she’s very unlikely to wake up. It’s practically impossible. We’ll transfer her to a single room and we can try some therapy, but there isn’t much we can do.”
The commissario turned to look at Nelide; she was still on her feet, motionless like her aunt, but from her lively intelligent eyes, it was clear that she wasn’t missing a word.
Modo resumed, more or less talking to himself: “I’ll see if I can lower the blood pressure from the hemorrhage. If she were younger, I’d try a decompressive skull trepanation, but a woman of her age, in her condition, would almost certainly die. I’m afraid even to attempt a phlebotomy, that is, cutting a vein in her arm. I’m going to have come up with something else.” He turned to Ricciardi: “Now get out of here, and this time I’m serious. You’re harmful, not just useless. You distract me and you worry me. Go home. And take the young lady with you, because she’s starting to scare me, standing there at the foot of the bed.”
Nelide gave him a long, hard look: “’Ntiempo re tempesta, ogni pertuso è casa.”
Modo turned to look at Ricciardi: “What?”
Ricciardi made a face: “In stormy weather, any hole in the wall becomes a home. I think it means she doesn’t intend to budge.”
The doctor stared at Nelide, eyes wide, as if he’d suddenly noticed that one of the metal lockers against the wall were actually alive.
“What are you saying, that she speaks in proverbs like an Indian chief? Fantastic. Well, if she wants to stay, I’m certainly not going to kick her out: just look at the muscles she has, I wouldn’t dream of trying to outwrestle her. But, please, you go. In addition to everything else, out in the hall there’s a sad brigadier turning his hat in his hands, and his mere presence is terrorizing the entire hospital. You know that a majority of my clientele is quite allergic to policemen.”
Ricciardi planted a kiss on Rosa’s forehead and bade farewell to Nelide with a nod. The girl, to his surprise, whispered: “Signori’, don’t worry. I’m in charge here. And anyway I’ll come home tonight and
take care of your things.”
The similarity to his tata’s way of speaking tugged at his heart.
In the hallway, Maione came up to him immediately, asking for an update on the situation. Ricciardi ran his hand through his hair: “For now she’s in stable condition, but Modo is pessimistic.”
“Commissa’, of course he is, that doctor is pessimistic on general principle. You’ll see, everything will turn out fine. You’re tired, that’s understandable. You want me to walk you home?”
Ricciardi thought of Rosa’s absence and Enrica’s empty window, and he shook his head: “No, no. I don’t want to go home. I’m too tense to sleep. I’ll drop by the office to kill some time.”
The brigadier gingerly patted his uniform: “I arranged to trade shifts with Cozzolino, who couldn’t quite believe he was getting a Sunday off, and is planning on taking one of his bimbos to the beach for a swim. I preferred to come in to work, too. At this point, Commissa’, why don’t we just get caught up on our work for next week and head over to the nursing home in Mergellina? That way we can look the man who sent the letter to the professor in the face.”
“Look at what’s become of us, eh, Raffaele? We’re diving into work on a Sunday in July, when everyone else is heading for the beach.”
XXXVII
After a short huddle, they decided to head over to Mergellina on foot. The endless night they’d just spent had left deep marks on both their moods, and the idea of subjecting themselves to a ride in a trolley full of beachgoers didn’t fit with their need for a breath of fresh air. So instead they would take Via Toledo, cross Piazza del Plebiscito, and follow Via Cesario Console to the water, then stay close to the waterfront, following Via Partenope and Via Caracciolo. An hour’s walk under the hot sun of the second Sunday in July.
Maione had gone home to change into a fresh uniform, and managed to take a short nap, but that had certainly done nothing to improve his state of mind; Ricciardi hadn’t had any chance at all to recharge, as could be seen from the stubble on his face and the marked unruliness of the lock of hair dangling over his forehead. They both felt out of place in the midst of the stream of people pouring out of both working-class neighborhoods and the posher streets of the city, and heading town toward the waterfront in search of coolness.
The city was dying of heat. And since it was July, the city wanted to have fun. And since the city wanted fun, it was willing to spend a little money, thus attracting a swarm of characters determined to take advantage of that willingness, whether by selling, bartering, or pilfering. This led to the creation of two opposing armies, Customers and Strolling Vendors, the latter more or less equipped with official permits, their ranks more or less battling to win the best spots.
From one end to the other, the city’s beaches had assumed the aspect of a long trench in which a bloodless war was being waged, where the phrase no thanks, I don’t need anything only marked the beginning of a skirmish. The fastest and most insistent vendors, who traveled with wooden crates hung over their necks on a leather strap, or else pushing ramshackle old perambulators repurposed for the occasion, were only encouraged by a rejection, which was after all a reply, and were capable of pestering a potential customer for hundreds of yards, repeatedly and irritatingly touching his or her arm to attract attention, until the exasperated victim shelled out a few cents in exchange for a useless packet of semenzelle or a flavorless spassatiempo, a mixture of pistachios, toasted chickpeas, and various seeds and nuts, wrapped in a conical sheet of newsprint. After eating whatever he’d been forced to buy, the hapless customer would toss the rinds to the ground, to the delight of the pigeons.
Far different was the attitude of those vendors who enjoyed the enviable advantage of a fixed location, foremost among them the fresh water sellers, the most beloved vendors on those sweltering days, with their circular kiosks topped with handsome round roofs reminiscent of cool Chinese pagodas, adorned with cascades of lemons and oranges, the mere sight of which offered relief from the heat. The water vendor would shoot an inviting wink, his big face red beneath the broad brim of his straw hat, his clean white smock reminiscent of the ice he scraped with a trowel to add to the limonata a cosce aperte (“spread-eagled lemonade,” so called because when the vendor added a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, the glass always overflowed, obliging the customer to gulp it down hastily, legs spread wide to keep from staining his trousers). Moreover, there was mineral water for sale, the iron-rich acqua ferrata of Beverello or the sulphureous acqua zuffregna of Chiatamone, which was kept in mummare, or amphorae, had a faint whiff of rotten eggs, and was beloved for the fundamental aid it provided in digestion. That aid came in especially handy because, if there was one desire that assailed visitors to the waterfront, it was for food, a temptation second only to that prompted by the naked legs of girls in swimsuits, the sight of which attracted more men than any burlesque show. Everywhere you turned, people were eating or trying to sell something to eat.
The air was full of calls. Jamm’, ’nu sordo: magne, bive e te lave ’a faccia! shouted the mellonaro, or melon man, displaying his multipurpose watermelons for just a penny; as his call in dialect explained, you could eat them, drink them, and even wash your face in them; and to emphasize how ripe and bright red they were, he added that they were full of fire, containing a veritable inferno: è chino ’e fuoco, tene ll’infierno dinto.
Currite, currite, ’e ppullanchelle! came the call-and-response from the opposite side of the street, as the spigaiola advertised her roasted corncobs, emphasizing their savory similarity to fat hens piping hot from the oven.
And it was virtually impossible to remain indifferent to the wares of the tarallaro, the vendor touting little salty doughnuts made of stale bread, pepper, pork lard, and almonds. Taralle, taralle frische, taralle càvere, he shouted, advertising a remarkable contradiction of temperatures, good for whatever a customer might prefer, cool or hot. Maione was a glutton for taralli, but he didn’t so much as deign to glance in any of the vendors’ direction.
Another summer delicacy were the prickly pears, sold from small stands. In this case the transformation of commerce into spectacle was even more interesting; not only did the vendors show off their skill at freeing the fruit of its thorny rind in less than two seconds with an incredible display of dexterity and the simultaneous use of two knives, they had also come up with a sort of riffa, or contest, known in dialect as the appizzata, that attracted throngs of customers. For just a few cents, a contestant could toss a long knife, tied to a length of twine, into a sack full of peeled prickly pears in the hopes of piercing one, which was then fished out of the bag, the winner’s property. Unfortunately, the vendors invariably placed the softest, ripest fruit at the top of the heap, and these of course always slipped off the knife.
Then there were the barbers, musicians, and shoeshine boys, the vendors of cigars, fried foods, goldfish, lottery tickets, bananas, gelato and candy, wine, oysters and seafood of all kinds, octopus, and ricotta, all of these entrepreneurs boasting in a magnificent cacophony the freshness, the quality, the unparalleled specialness of their goods to the throngs willing to subject themselves to an unspeakable ordeal in order to obtain just a moment’s cool respite from the heat at the beach.
The street urchins, naked or clad in nothing more than a rag, tied around the waist, chased after each other, laughing and playing pranks on the passersby, knocking off hats or hiking skirts, adding even more chaos to the general state of confusion. Off the piers and the boulders of the breakwaters, boys and girls showed off their dives in a roughly competitive style, lifting geysers of water and provoking all sorts of insults from the elderly gentlemen trying to read their newspapers while soaking their feet in the lapping water. Mixed teams challenged each other to games of tug-of-war after recruiting the fattest men on the beach, who competed clad in full-body bathing suits that stretched tight over their prominent bellies.
Just inland from the w
aterfront ran the Villa Nazionale, every bit as crowded but at least free of the automobiles, carriages, bicycles, and motorcycles with sidecars that struggled to push their way through the traffic on the main thoroughfare. There the population was different: sweaty nannies, in black domestic uniforms with lace headpieces, pushed monumental perambulators, struggling to keep the older children from breaking away to play soccer with their lower-class contemporaries; ladies on their husbands’ arms, shielding themselves from the sun with silk parasols; well-dressed young men with well-tended mustaches strolling two by two in search of pretty girls willing to accept offers of a cool beverage in a café.
The latter dandies reminded Maione of the notorious Fefè and the mystery of Lucia’s afternoon outings, putting him in an even worse mood than ever. But he wasn’t the only one walking through a forest of phantoms. Ricciardi practically hadn’t uttered a word the whole way, his heart ravaged by the thought of Rosa and her dark sleep.
Neither alive nor dead, he thought, as anguish darkened his soul, in sharp contrast to the explosion of summer joy surrounding him. In the midst of so many young people smiling at life, so many men and women enjoying the summer Sunday as if there were no such thing as tomorrow, the Deed showed him the lingering traces of madness, violence, and tragedy. A half-naked boy with a broken neck called to his mother from the cliffs onto which he’d slammed down; two fishermen prayed and cursed, face-to-face, their lips blue from the icy water in which they’d drowned; in the shade of one of the holm oaks of the Villa Nazionale, a man was gushing blood in spurts from his belly, sliced open by a knife blade, as he muttered about the money that had been taken from him.
The Bottom of Your Heart Page 20